Ecuador has used the U.S. dollar as its official currency since dollarization in 2000, which makes any coin bearing a centavo denomination something of a curiosity — these pieces function as fractional coinage within a dollarized system, with the cent effectively serving as the local subunit. The Jaime Roldós issue commemorates the populist president who died in a 1981 plane crash in the southern Andes, a death that has never stopped generating conspiracy theories given the concurrent deaths of Panama's Omar Torrijos five months later under nearly identical circumstances.
KM#133 places this in a commemorative circulation series rather than a standard issue.
Ecuador has used the U.S. dollar as its official currency since dollarization in 2000, which makes any coin bearing a centavo denomination something of a curiosity — these pieces function as fractional coinage within a dollarized system, with the cent effectively serving as the local subunit. The Jaime Roldós issue commemorates the populist president who died in a 1981 plane crash in the southern Andes, a death that has never stopped generating conspiracy theories given the concurrent deaths of Panama's Omar Torrijos five months later under nearly identical circumstances.
KM#133 places this in a commemorative circulation series rather than a standard issue.